In the third installment of Richard Linklater's trilogy, there's more to Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy's relationship than romance and sharp banter.

One of the Sundance Film Festival's most reliable pleasures is the breakout buzz that surrounds previously unheralded artists and their works, such as Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know, Lee Daniels' Precious, or Benh Zeitlin's Beasts of the Southern Wild. Fresh talents popped up at this winter's Sundance too, and you'll read about them in future ELLEs when their films come out. But the biggest hit there involved a well-known director, a familiar love story, and two attractive stars who also cowrote the script. So what's all the excitement about? Your life, maybe.

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Before Midnight, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, is the latest in what fans call the Before trilogy—Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and now this film—directed by the versatile Richard Linklater, whose range runs from the rotoscopic animation of A Scanner Darkly to the elegant New York period piece Me and Orson Welles. When he turned to romantic themes, the result wasn't going to be like anyone else's. The three-parter is really a saga stretching over 18 years and exploring the nature and vagaries of love. It begins in 1995, when American Jesse (Hawke) and French Celine (Delpy) meet up as bright students abroad; they have only a night together, but at their age, that's enough to fall in love. They agree to reunite several months later, but one of them fails to make the rendezvous, so nine years pass—for them and us—before they meet again, in 2004's Before Sunset. Jesse has become a famous novelist whose book tour ends in Paris; Celine is passionately immersed in her work at a nonprofit. But when she sees that he's doing a final bookstore reading, she slips inside, only to realize that he has written about their time together nine years earlier. Worse yet, he's married—unhappily, but there's a child.

The youthful Sunrise is witty and charming, but a note of raw, anguished intimacy emerges in Sunset. And despite Midnight's wry humor and delectable setting at the southern end of Greece's Peloponnese peninsula, that dark note sharpens in the latest installment (I'm rooting for at least one more) when Jesse and Celine have lunch with their host, an older writer; a married couple whose bantering ease with each other stands in pointed contrast to our heroes; a radiant pair of young lovers whose erotic magnetism is as carefree as Jesse and Celine's was thwarted at their age; and a widow who, as her memory of her husband dims before her undiminished love does, feels as if she's losing him all over again. This brings tears to people's eyes—so it's a jolt to witness Celine's response to all this: a hard stare of cold midlife evaluation.

If you haven't seen Sunrise and Sunset, do so before watching Midnight; you'll know Celine and Jesse and their quick-witted verbosity as well as if they lived next door. A British journo called them "star-crossed chatter-boxes," which is funny but not quite fair. Like Hawke and Delpy, who wrote much of their own dialogue, their characters are intellectuals who fall for each other as much with their minds as with their bodies. The blaring brashness of today's romantic comedies pays off handsomely at the box office, but the art-house audience for this trilogy has been strong too: The arc of our lives is being etched in theirs, roughly a decade at a time.

The Midnight decade is a rough one indeed. It opens in an airport as Jesse bids an unhappy farewell to his 14-year-old son, who, per a bitter divorce settlement, is allowed to visit Dad and his new family only for a few summer weeks. Jesse and Celine, who are in their early forties and live in France, have twin seven-year-old girls who have curly blond hair the color of their mother's and are so innocently beautiful they could have stepped out of a Victorian fairy book. But while Celine marvels at these amazing creatures who came out of her body, when she calls Jesse the love of her life she sounds almost resentful. After 40, love has sharp eyes, and some things aren't funny at all. In Before Sunset Delpy's Celine let loose on Jesse with nine years of pain that she had bottled up, furious and mortified that she still cared. Like a grand soprano strutting her stuff, she delivered one of the most hilarious—and heartfelt—arias of female rage ever to scorch a movie screen. In Midnight there's a whole fight-night at the opera, and, like the trilogy overall, it feels absolutely real. One critic at Sundance called the third film the funniest yet, but I sat there with my articulate parents' every hair-raising quarrel scrolling through my head. Linklater and his gifted collaborators are fearless. To paraphrase another great star, marriage isn't for sissies, and neither is love.